Taking a stand on political advertisements which was midway between Facebook and Twitter, Alphabet Inc’s Google said in a blog post on Wednesday that the ability of political advertisers to target ads for elections with the help of data such as public voter records and general political affiliations will be completely stopped by it.

All social media companies including Google and its platforms such as YouTube have been under pressure in recent times over their policies of dealing with political advertisements ahead of the 2020 presidential elections in the United States.

Age, gender and general location at a postal code level will be the only parameters that political advertisers will be allowed to use for targeted ads, Google said. However the company said that it would still be possible for political advertisers to take advantage of contextually targeting for example, targeting specific ads to people reading about that specific topic.

Data gleaned from users’ behaviour, such as search actions, that categorized them as left-leaning, right-leaning or independent, could also be used previously for targeting the ads by verified political advertisers earlier. They could also upload data such as voter file lists to target ads to a lookalike audience which exhibited similar behaviours to those in the data.

The new norms for political ads will be implemented in the United Kingdom within a week by Google ahead of the general election there on December 12. And by the end of the year, Google will implement this new policy in the European Union, the company said, while it will roll it out for the rest of the world on January 6, 2020.

“Given recent concerns and debates about political advertising, and the importance of shared trust in the democratic process, we want to improve voters’ confidence in the political ads they may see on our ad platforms,” Scott Spencer, vice president of product management for Google Ads, said in the blog post.

It is expected that the political advertisers will shift some of the ads to television because of the changes brought in by Google.

Due to the new restrictions, he will stop licensing Google’s ad-buying tool in January, said Tim Cameron, chief executive of FlexPoint Media, which buys ads for Republican campaigns.

People who did not regularly cast a ballot were targeted and urged to come out to vote by FlexPoint with the help of the voter file feature. Cameron said that “a slow decline of civic participation” could be the result of the loss of such targeting and could hurt the ability of “insurgent, underfunded candidates” to gain support.

Google also added examples to its misrepresentation policy to show that it would not allow false claims about election results or the eligibility of political candidates based on age or birthplace.

An ad run by President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign on its YouTube video-streaming service was refused to be removed by Google last month even tough through the Democratic presidential hopeful Joe Biden’s campaign alleged that the ad contained false claims. Google however said that it could not pull the ad down because it had not violated its community policy.

The video would still be allowed under the latest policy, a Google spokeswoman of Google told Reuters on Wednesday, even with the new changes made.

(Adapted from IndiaToday.com)

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